Light up your finest cigar and get ready to kiss the ring: The godfather is back.
No, not Marlon Brando (may he rest in peace). It’s billionaire angel investor Ron Conway, long known as the Godfather of Silicon Valley, who is once again throwing his financial weight around in hopes that Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s mayoral campaign sleeps with the fishes.
Conway just dropped $100,000 into a political action committee called “Residents Opposing Aaron Peskin for Mayor 2024” — the angel investor’s biggest financial bet this election season. The San Francisco Association of Realtors is also donating $50,000 to campaign against the sole progressive mayoral candidate.
Mary Jung — another longtime Peskin foe and principal officer of the new PAC — said the committee aims to highlight the supervisor’s complicity in the city’s ills.
“Aaron Peskin is a major reason why San Francisco is so broken and the chief architect of our city’s dysfunction over the last 24 years,” she said in a statement. “We’ve seen enough. We don’t need him anywhere near the mayor’s office and we are making sure voters know his record and don’t rank him anywhere on their ballots.”
Peskin faces a tough race as moderates outspend him by large margins. Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie is nearing the $9 million mark in fundraising (largely on his own dime), Mayor London Breed has raked in $2 million, and former mayor Mark Farrell reported a $1.8 million haul. Peskin trails with $1.5 million — and he doesn’t have the sizable PAC support some of the other candidates have.
Breed and Lurie continue to lead in the polls. But recently, after moderate candidates began slamming one another in attack ads, Peskin polled within striking distance.
One source with knowledge of Conway’s motivations said that’s exactly why he’s spending against Peskin.
“While the moderate candidates obliterate each other,” the source said, “they’re working to make sure Aaron doesn’t get to Room 200 [the mayor’s office] through the back door.”
Peskin campaign manager Sunny Angulo said she takes the same message from Conway’s spending: Her candidate has moderates scared.
“You know Aaron is surging in this race if they’re resurrecting Ron Conway and his money bags from the dead!” she said. “San Francisco is worth fighting for, and so are our schools, our neighbors, and our small businesses. Too bad Ron Conway disagrees and is doubling down on an agenda of displacement, division, and dysfunction — but I guess billionaires are gonna burn money!”
Conway also gave tens of thousands this election cycle to the GrowSF PAC, which supports a slate of moderate Democrat mayoral candidates, and donated the $500 limit to help Breed win another term. Nationally, he reportedly played an outsize role in pushing President Biden to relinquish his reelection campaign to Vice President Kamala Harris.
But the donation against Peskin is a return to form for the once-feared bogeyman of San Francisco progressives. A decade ago, Conway was known as the heavy who funded allies of the late Mayor Ed Lee, who in turn supported tax breaks for the tech sector and defended Airbnb, Twitter, and Uber as progressives tried to reign in tech’s impact. His deep pockets unloaded on Supervisor David Campos in his Assembly race against now-City Attorney David Chiu, and he spent big on ballot measures backed by Lee.
Yet no progressive has roused his ire quite as much as Peskin.
Roughly 10 years ago, Conway and Lee rallied behind appointed Supervisor Julie Christensen to oppose Peskin to represent Chinatown, North Beach, and other District 3 neighborhoods. They dumped thousands of dollars into a committee against Peskin’s election bid, including airing a “Mad Men”-style ad lambasting the supervisor’s penchant for angry late-night phone calls.
It didn’t work. Peskin won handily, then won another term after that. Along the way, he served up regulations and taxes aplenty against Airbnb, Uber, and other tech darlings.
Or, as Angulo put it, “Ron Conway spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep Aaron off the Board of Supervisors in 2015, and we wiped the floor with him and his dirty money.”
This election cycle, then, sees the Godfather and the Napoleon of North Beach duel once again.